split my hackpro into dual virtualized workstations

So last year I build a new overkill hack pro, I had this in mind at the time but GFX cards were too stupidly priced to execute on it.. Friday I got a delivery of 2 GFX Cards, and 3 SSD's and spent the last day or so fighting this, but finally SUCCESS!

My wife bought a MacMini years ago and never really used it because its performance was soo poor, and its impossible to upgrade.. so she used her work laptop, but now she's thinking of switching jobs so I needed to get this going ASAP.. Also my oldest son is now 8yro and ready to play some Fortnight and other PC games w/Dad..

My office is setup with 2 identical 28in dual monitor desks head to head, old pic: https://imgur.com/a/vmcXL, so splitting this machine into two virtual workstations is naturally going to work very well.. I made a VM template and then cloned it into the two machines, so when updates and stuff come out I can clone another instance with no physical hardware and test updates.. Can also make snapshots and roll back easy, this was the only way to get a good WAF score w/a Hackintosh for the wife.

Performance is stellar, goes to show how overkill the 14c Intel i9x was for me this last year.. if anything it feels faster because now I have Quad Channel RAM and a much, much much better GFX card (1050 -> RX580), I been using the MacMini for the last few days while I was rebuilding this setup.. and my wife is going to be quite pleased with her hackpro xmas gift.

Metal:

  • CPU: i9-7940X (14C/28T)
  • MBD: Asus x299
  • GFX: Nvidia 1050 PEG
  • RAM: 64GB
  • OS: Proxmox 5.3 (in a cluster w/my threadripper server)
  • OS Disk: Dual 256MB 860 EVO SATA in ZFS Mirror

Darwin (Mine):

  • MacOS 10.14.2
  • CPU: 8C/16T
  • RAM: 28GB
  • MSI RX 580 8GB
  • 80GB OS vDisk
  • 1TB Samsung 870 EVO NVMe (User Home)
  • USB3 PCI Passthrough

Newton (Wife/Kids):

  • MacOS 10.14.2
  • CPU: 6C/12T
  • RAM: 28GB
  • MSI RX 580 8GB
  • 80GB OS vDISK
  • 512GB Samsung 860 EVO NVMe (User Home)
  • USB3 PCI Passthrough

notes:

Problem now is I needa go pickup some DP to DVI cables tomorrow so I can hook all 4 monitors up, and a couple desktop USB hubs.. in the next year imna replace these 4 monitors with two dell 38in ultrawides and then rock this setup for a good long while.

submitted by /u/bentripin
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